Which ball head? Really right BH40 or BH30

[Bernice Loui]

Suggest using a conventional-traditional 3 way pan-tilt head sized as needed. These can be found with ease as there were a LOT of them made from a host of brands. A light weight 4x5 field camera is likely to be less than 5 pounds full up with lens and all. This is not that much more than a DSLR or medium format camera with a larger lens. There is a tripod-camera support system requirement for rigidity and stability (heavier and all that IS better, but), but it is just not that great with a lightweight field camera.

It might be ideal to try the 4x5 on a reasonable ball head then decide if a better ball head is the way. Essentially, take a test drive before deciding on the final choice of tripod head.

Tripods and tripod heads tend to get travel-user abuse and getting something pretty-precious will be reduced to a foto utility item in short time. Keeping this simple could be the the better trade off.


Bernice

[Drew Wiley]

Ball heads remind me of "bobble heads" - little dolls with spring-loaded bouncy heads you see on people's dashboards. With respect to a lightwt 4x5 field camera with modest bellows extension, the problem is nowhere near as bad as with bigger or heavier view cameras. But the common sense aspect of this is still inherently related to basic torque-vector physics. You're centering all the potential wobble on a little stem. Why???? Dead-weight ratings don't even begin to tell the story. Being out in the trenches does. Can you imagine a surveyor ever mounting an old transit or modern theodolite atop a little stem? It would be absurd. Nobody in their right mind would hire a surveyor who would take that kind of hokey risk. Yes, a good ball head will have a significantly stiffened stem compared to a cheap one. But it's still a counterproductive concept. You ideally want the center of gravity as low as possible, and as much contact with a platform surface as possible, without a weak link in between. Of course, marketing has nothing to do with basic common-sense physics; so myths remain, and evidently remain profitable.

[Pieter]

Ballheads are a delight to use with MF or 35mm SLRs. They enable you to quickly and easily position the camera. I wouldn't use anything else for those SLRs. With LF, you end up wrestling the beast to get it in position, then have to deal with really tightening the head down so nothing creeps if the camera is at steep angle.

[Drew Wiley]

To each his own. I find ballheads to be ridiculous in general. I do use a decent Gitzo pan/tilt head for modest medium format usage, never anymore for large format, and never with really long MF lenses. A true geared head is more realistic than a ballhead, but anything truly solid would be both heavy and very expensive. In the lab I actually have a big Sinar P setup attached to a micrometer-driven machined-bronze WWII ship gun sighting mount. I got it for free. But something like that would probably cost eight thousand dollars today, if anyone was even willing to make it. But if you want the cat's meow in a compact block, try military surplus instead of the camera store.

[Peter De Smidt]

We haven't heard any of this before.

[David Lindquist]

Maybe we can stipulate that those who want to use a ball head with their view camera may do so and those who don't want to don't have to. Full disclosure: I probably have more tripod heads than any normal person needs, as it happens none are ball heads.

David

[Drew Wiley]

That's a valid request, David. But the reasons "why" might not always be immediately apparent to some; so perhaps discussing a broader range of options has its benefits too. The original poster has a modest weight camera that could probably be successfully used on a decent ballhead. But scale things up just a little bit, and that formula might fail, because it is indeed all about torque vector. Double your bellows extension and it equates to twice as much force on the stem of the ball. Being unable to center that weight and having it all forward, with perhaps a large-shutter lens out on the end, upsets things even more. Going to 8x10 format even in the same camera design, and you ordinarily double the width of the camera bed, and dramatically increase torque stress that direction. Mere weight ratings don't tell you any of that. Go back to my analogy of surveyors. Their devices don't impose anywhere near the torque factor of most view cameras; yet they never use any kind of intermediate support, and there's a very good reason why. It's the same reason why surveyor tripods all have large platform tops, just like an ideal view camera tripod should. As someone who actually sold survey equipment, and did mapmaking in my youth with traditional transits, I could explain this in considerable detail, but somebody would probably complain. I'm not after converts, but just suggesting a genuinely lightweight option which happens to provide the most stability of all. And yes, just as Peter implies, there are plenty of past threads on the same topic.

[Peter De Smidt]

Which we've discussed a huge number of times. Does it need to be discussed again? I mean, wouldn't it save time to cut and paste the following to _every_ tripod/support question:

Drew: no head. tripod heads are for slackers who don't care about sharpness.
Bernice: optical bench goniometer. Other heads are for slackers who don't care about precision.
Bernice: If you do feel like slacking, then a Sinar pan/tilt.
Bob: a three-way leveling head from linhof or Berlebach. Genau!
Any F64 traditionalist: Get a Ries head...or we'll confiscate your spot meter.
Anyone who likes strength, light weight, and quick adjustment: Get a good ball head. Learn how to use it.
Someone who has too much money: Arca Swiss cube. It goes with my watch!

[Peter Lauridsen]

Which we've discussed a huge number of times. Does it need to be discussed again? I mean, wouldn't it save time to cut and paste the following to _every_ tripod/support question:

Drew: no head. tripod heads are for slackers who don't care about sharpness.
Bernice: optical bench goniometer. Other heads are for slackers who don't care about precision.
Bernice: If you do feel like slacking, then a Sinar pan/tilt.
Bob: a three-way leveling head from linhof or Berlebach. Genau!
Any F64 traditionalist: Get a Ries head...or we'll confiscate your spot meter.
Anyone who likes strength, light weight, and quick adjustment: Get a good ball head. Learn how to use it.
Someone who has too much money: Arca Swiss cube. It goes with my watch!

This I like!

[Drew Wiley]

Yes, I realize that I've loudly preached and screeched about this so many times on this forum that I deserve to be called the Headless Hoarse Man. But the science behind it is exactly why simplified low-profile heads are themselves preferred by many, like the low-profile Ries head, or the Sinar option. I just get tired of hearing people complain about "variations between lenses" and how they got a bad one, when they really had no idea of how to properly stabilize a camera in the first place. There are a couple other forums where I hear this all the time about the Pentax 6X7 300 lenses. I use both styles of em, and they're heavy, obviously hang forward, and need even stronger stabilization than my 8x10. So I use both the lens collar and the thread on the camera body itself, unite them to a single block of maple, and bolt that directly to my big Ries platform. End of story. Total cost about three dollars, and no ball head on earth is more secure. So Peter, please add one more option to your list: spend a whole lot of money, lug around a bunch of redundant extra weight, and maybe never learn there's a way simpler, more reliable way to do it. And yes, there's a valid reason for me recommending Ries wooden tripods too, though I do use other types when necessary. But as long as I'm getting hoarse once again, or at least preaching common horse sense, I just can't get out of my mind a sight a number of years ago of some rich guy standing in the in the middle of a meadow in Yosemite all afternoon with about ten grand of brand new gear, assuming that if all that stuff were expensive enough he was going to bag a classic Ansel shot - brand new Sinar P, expensive brand new Sinaron apo lens, expensive tripod, and an expensive ballhead, with that damned 8x10 jiggling at every tiny change in the breeze, and him standing in the snow waiting and waiting for that camera to stop wobbling. He probably gave up at dark, and sold off all that gear half price the next weekend.